In a typical cellular radio system, wireless terminal(s) communicates via a Radio Access Network (RAN) to one or more Core Networks (CN). The wireless terminal is also known as mobile station and/or User Equipment (UE), such as mobile telephones, cellular telephones, smart phones, tablet computers and laptops with wireless capability. The user equipment's may be, for example, portable, pocket-storable, hand-held, computer-comprised, or car-mounted mobile devices which communicate voice and/or data via the RAN.
The RAN covers a geographical area via cells, where each cell is being served by a base station, e.g., a Radio Base Station (RBS), which in some networks is also called NodeB, B node, evolved Node B (eNB) or Base Transceiver Station (BTS). The term base station will be used in the following when referring to any of the above examples. From a user equipment perspective the network is represented by a number of cells.
Various generations of mobile communication systems have evolved from the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has undertaken to evolve further the earlier technologies. Currently for “New Radio” (NR), the name given for 5G technology to be standardized by 3GPP, is envisioning 3 main technical areas in which NR will be standardized: Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC), and URLLC (Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications).
It has been discussed the use of Outer Erasure Codes for New Radio. The use cases therein envisioned for outer erasure codes were:                Outer erasure code for bursty puncturing/interference mitigation/recovery:                    To sustain eMBB spectrum efficiency and other QoS in the presence of URLLC bursty puncturing/interference            To combat WiFi-type bursty interference in unlicensed band            To enable efficient spectrum sharing between low latency high priority and normal latency low priority users in a shared spectrum access scenario            To sustain eMBB spectrum efficiency in the presence different types of bursty interference (either from future 5G waveforms and or in potential future deployment scenarios)                        Outer erasure code to decouple bursty interference/puncturing recovery process from regular physical (PHY) layer demod/decode and PHY layer HARQ processing:                    To support for pipeline processing and low latency decoding at PHY to enable single interlace HARQ (as oppose to deep interleaving, which introduces delay and buffering)            To recover lost code blocks due to bursty puncturing at MAC layer and decouple the code block (CB) erasure recover from PHY layer HARQ process                        Outer erasure code to mitigate bursty interference/puncturing with low uplink feedback and downlink signaling overhead:                    To reduce the amount of CB-level ack information feedback (only number of CB parities needed instead of CB Ack bitmap needs to be fed back)            To reduce DL control overhead for PHY HARQ process management                        Outer erasure code to reduced latency and buffering:                    Outer erasure code to enable fast PHY HARQ turn-around.            Outer erasure code across multiple carriers/multiple HARQ interlaces to reduce ARQ latency and buffering due to reordering.                        Outer erasure code over broadcast channel to combat bursty interference, time selective fading and shadowing.        
Candidates for fifth generation (5G) new RAT data transmission are identified as the following (It is RAN1 common understanding that combination of below codes is not precluded, and Outer erasure code is not precluded): Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) code, Polar code, Convolutional code (LTE and/or enhanced convolutional coding), and Turbo code (LTE and/or enhanced turbo coding).
Selection of 5G new RAT channel coding scheme(s) may consider: Performance, Implementation complexity, Latency (Decoding/Encoding), and Flexibility (e.g., variable code length, code rate, HARQ (as applicable for particular scenario(s))).
It has not been discussed how any form of signaling as to how to design signaling to use these codes.
What is needed, and an object and advantage of the technology disclosed herein, are improved apparatus, methods, and techniques for rateless codes.